‘A merry-go-round of buck-passing’ was the most quoted description of the evidence presented at the official inquiry into the deadliest fire in Britain since the second world war. On the night of 14 June 2017, within 30 minutes a conflagration engulfed all 24 floors of Grenfell Tower in west London. Seventy-two people lost their lives. For anyone listening to the evidence, it quickly became clear that the fire was utterly avoidable, a disaster waiting to happen.
It was also more than that. The evidence exposed much that was, and remains, wrong with British society. It amounted to a powerful allegory, symbolic of contemporary Britain, in which fraud, deceit, deregulation, austerity, privatisation, cosy networks, greed and sheer incompetence all played a part in the disaster.
All these have been exposed, to varying degrees, through other recent inquiries into NHS blood contamination, the handling of the Covid pandemic and the Post Office scandal in which more than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted. The prospect of another terrible miscarriage of justice now faces the Grenfell survivors and bereaved.
Austerity costs
The legacy continues to strike deep in the grief, the emotional and physical suffering, and the trauma that still haunts the victims’ families and friends – and among the many thousands of tenants and leaseholders in hundreds of buildings still clad in the same type of flammable materials used at Grenfell Tower.
Cost-cutting at Grenfell by the use of cheaper, flammable, materials saved less than £300,000 in a £10 million refurbishment project, which was itself required due to failings in the original construction of the building. The inquiry alone has cost at least £173 million, much of it on lawyers’ fees, along with more than £400 million spent by the Ryal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea on response and recovery. The cost to the taxpayer has already exceeded £500 million. Meanwhile, a compensation scheme involving 900 individual victims of the fire, and totalling £150 million at an average of £166,000 each, has been agreed so far.
It is worth recalling these figures to demonstrate the awful consequences of austerity, and the cuts and the culture of indifference they breed in Britain’s public services. Such measures, always sold as ‘cost cutting’, in the end lead to greater public expenditure as well as incalculable costs in human suffering. There have been plenty of examples in the past, of course, but Grenfell should be a defining lesson for future British governments.
The Grenfell inquiry’s report describes how residents of the tower, whose warnings were repeatedly ignored, were treated like second-class citizens
The Metropolitan Police has devoted nearly 200 officers (and spent £100 million) investigating the disaster. Nearly 60 individuals and 20 organisations are estimated to be in the frame for offences including corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, misconduct in public office and health and safety offences. Yet despite – and perhaps because of – the devastating indictment in the final report of the seven-year Grenfell inquiry, it is possible not one individual, corporation or institution will be successfully prosecuted. A successful criminal prosecution relies on proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt, showing direct causation, which cannot be argued in court using the inquiry’s findings, however damning they may be.
The companies and their executives are expected to argue that years of hostile comment have prejudiced their right to a fair trial. Former prime ministers, who should have known much better, have provided the companies with even more ammunition by shamefully playing down, even excusing, the responsibility of those involved in the building work.
An unequal disaster
The inquiry’s report describes how residents of the tower, whose warnings were repeatedly ignored, were treated like second-class citizens by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, whose officials were indifferent to the safety of vulnerable people, brushing aside repeated warnings about fire hazards, including f ire doors that would not close and poor ventilation. The inquiry heard how a resident of the tower, who lived on the 15th floor, suffered from bowel cancer. For six months his flat had no functioning lavatory.
The borough’s cabinet member responsible for housing, Rock Feilding-Mellen, told the inquiry he did not register what he called a ‘passing comment’ about the decision to clad the tower in cheaper panels as he was focusing at the time on a dispute about what colour they should be. Turquoise, British racing green, and champagne were among the suggestions, battleship grey his preference. Feilding-Mellen, a property developer from an aristocratic background, resigned a fortnight after the fire.
Class played a part in the fatal disaster, although it was skirted over by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the former appeal court judge who chaired the inquiry. And there was an undercurrent of racism, avoided by the inquiry in its final report. These issues came to the surface only when they were raised by lawyers representing the victims. Leslie Thomas, counsel for a group of the bereaved and residents, said he had no doubt the disaster was ‘inextricably linked’ with race, which he described as the ‘elephant in the room’.
The fire happened, Thomas told the inquiry, ‘within a pocket of one of the smallest yet richest boroughs in London, one of the richest cities in Europe… Yet the community affected was predominantly working class. The majority of people who died were people of colour.’ The disaster occurred, he continued, in a city where there was one housing system for the rich and another for the poor. He noted that the latest English Housing Survey found that 40 per cent of those living in high-rise buildings in the socially-rented sector were black, Asian, or from other minority ethnic backgrounds.
The culture of privatisation
The culture of privatisation Wealthy companies indulged in lies, corruption and greed, manipulating and covering up the results of fire safety tests, including one that showed the material chosen for the tower’s refurbishment could burn ‘like a raging inferno’. The inquiry’s final report refers to ‘systematic dishonesty’ with the construction companies employing ‘deliberate and sustained strategies to… mislead the market’.
A director of the French subsidiary of Arconic, a large US conglomerate, knew the panels used to clad the tower were dangerous. In secret internal correspondence referring to the British market, he nonetheless said that the company could ‘still work with regulators who are not so restrictive’. Celotex, originally a British firm taken over by the French multinational, Saint Gobain, manufactured the flammable insulation panels.
The prevailing culture in the industry was revealed by Jonathan Roper, a young Celotex manager, who admitted he went along with actions that were ‘completely unethical’ and that rigged tests on the company’s products amounted to a ‘fraud on the market’. An executive from Kingspan, an Irish-based foam insulation manufacturer, responded to a warning that the foam could fuel a fire by telling a colleague: ‘They can go fuck themselves.’ The company said later that it had ‘no knowledge’ its product had been used on Grenfell Tower.
‘Accidents don’t just happen. In all of these things, somebody made a choice, and they made that choice because our lives are cheap and they don’t matter’
These are just a few examples of the shocking evidence of the consequences of privatisation and deregulation by successive governments, Labour and Conservative, as ministers blamed their officials, and officials blamed their ministers. Systemic failures that should have been apparent years earlier, extended to the London Fire Brigade (LFB) – specifically in the way it stuck to its traditional ‘stay put’ advice to residents, and in poor training and a chronic lack of effective leadership. Andy Roe, now LFB commissioner, who abandoned the ‘stay put’ advice after he took control of the rescue operation an hour after the fire started, described the LFB as being part of the ‘most appalling example of institutional failure in recent British history’.
The Fire Service College, responsible for training firefighters, was sold in 2013 to the private outsourcing company, Capita, a widely criticised beneficiary of many government contracts. The Building Research Establishment (BRE), responsible for testing construction products, was privatised in 1977. The inquiry accused it of ‘unprofessional conduct, inadequate practices, a lack of effective oversight, poor reporting and a lack of scientific rigour’. It became too indulgent towards the companies.
In 2012, David Cameron said he wanted to ‘kill off the health and safety culture for good’. Two years later, he proudly described his government as the first in modern history that had succeeded in imposing less regulation. When the final Grenfell inquiry report was published in September 2024, Cameron claimed it was ‘clear that fire safety and building safety regulations were explicitly excluded from… the “red tape reviews”, given the importance we placed on safety and build quality’.
That is not what the inquiry heard. Brian Martin, a senior civil servant, described regulation as a ‘dirty word’ within his Department of Communities and Local Government. Lord Pickles, his secretary of state, insisted the Cameron government’s anti-red tape drive had not covered building fire safety regulations. The inquiry report concluded that Pickles’ evidence was ‘flatly contradicted by that of his officials and by the contemporaneous documents’.
Pickles delayed implementing the coroner’s recommendations following a fatal fire at Lakanal House in south London in 2009, as the government’s deregulation agenda began to dominate his department’s thinking. The Grenfell inquiry found that ‘even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded’.
Responsibility refused
Tony Blair, like Cameron, has a lot to answer for. But he, like Cameron, has tried to downplay the devastating criticisms. The Grenfell inquiry concluded that Blair’s government ‘failed to heed the warning’ from a Commons committee in 1999 that it should not take a fatal fire for steps to be taken to reduce the risks posed by flammable cladding systems. In 2001, the Blair government ‘failed to pay due regard to the striking results of a large-scale test’ of panels, used on the Grenfell tower, ‘which burned violently’.
When Blair was asked whether he accepted the inquiry report’s criticisms, he replied: ‘This is a difficult thing to say but it’s the honest truth – however good your system is and however well-intentioned it is, and however hard people work, they’re going to make mistakes.’ He added: ‘I don’t think you’re ever going to get a situation where decisions are perfectly taken in perfect circumstances and there aren’t accidents or tragedies that occur.’
His comments provoked angry replies from the Grenfell survivors. Yvette Williams, the founder of the campaigning group, Justice4Grenfell, said Blair’s use of the word ‘accidents’ made her ‘feel like it’s just jettisoning our lives at whim… they can be cast away at any time, because accidents happen. But they don’t just happen. In all of these things, somebody made a choice along the way, and they made that choice because our lives are cheap and they don’t matter.’
Grenfell residents and the bereaved say justice has not been delivered and those responsible for the disaster must be held to account through the Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service. A criminal investigation began in 2017 but the Met later said it would not submit a file to prosecutors until the inquiry concluded. The CPS now says that it does not expect to make any decisions on charges until the end of 2026. Some observers say even that is too optimistic.
Michael Mansfield, representing a group of survivors and bereaved, says the police investigation should have come first. ‘You decide what’s the most important thing here. The most important thing, where there are obvious offences, is you investigate at the earliest chance. Justice delayed is justice denied.’
Hisam Choucair, who lost six members of his family in the fire, later drove home the point at a meeting arranged by Kimia Zabihzan, advocate of the Grenfell Next of Kin campaigning group. Choucair emphasised that the bereaved did not ask for the inquiry and were not consulted. ‘The inquiry was set up because the government knew it would be under criminal investigation itself – to take the heat out of the situation and avoid social disorder,’ he said.
Future tests
The inquiry panel said there must be a legal requirement for the government to maintain a record of recommendations made by inquiries, coroners and parliamentary committees, with a description of steps taken in response to them. That proposal could be strengthened by the Labour government’s promise to introduce a ‘Hillsborough law’. Such a move would impose a duty of candour on politicians, and public servants, enforcing ‘a positive duty to tell the truth’ and requiring them to ‘proactively assist investigations’. It will be a huge test. Paying lip service to criticism and recommendations for action, then pigeonholing them, is deeply embedded in the Whitehall psyche.
Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader and minister responsible for housing, told her party conference in September that she was ‘absolutely astonished’ to learn how many buildings still had unsafe cladding. Since 2017, the year of the Grenfell fire, of nearly 5,000 buildings in England (containing 258,000 individual flats) identified as having ‘life-critical’ cladding and other serious fire safety defects, less than 30 per cent had been fixed. She faces a daunting task, facing up to construction companies and landlords as well as to complacent government officials. As many as 600,000 leaseholders and tenants are living in homes exposed as dangerous by the fire.
All this has happened in a Britain ranked as the sixth wealthiest country in the world. That measure is informed by GDP, ignoring growing inequalities, increasing poverty and physical and mental health problems, against a background of cronyism and complacency in a Treasury-dominated Whitehall – the permanent government. As a succession of public inquiries have demonstrated, those entrenched dynamics can be overcome only by a fundamental shake-up in the way we are governed.
